A Year in Portland

The last few weeks every day has felt like an anniversary of sorts. Tuesday, July 18, 2006, we drove into Portland as a famiy. Or, caravanned in, me driving the minivan with two kids, him the Civic with two more. We’d spent the night in Boise, the night before that just outside Salt Lake City, the night before that near the Grand Canyon, after leaving my parents in Albuquerque. I’d had one brief weekend here, before, looking at a school for the kids, seeing neighborhoods and deciding if this was really something I could do, but I think the commitment had been made as soon as we realized we could leave Dallas, we could live anywhere…

Why Portland? There are so many little things that go into such a decision. I always liked the pine tree on the license plate. Had a college roommate from Oregon. Had had a wonderful trip to Seattle but were daunted at its size. Scientifically, we made a spreadsheet of all the potential places we could move, with a score on its assets and drawbacks, proximity to family, the mountains, which I’d missed achingly in Texas, proximity to an ocean, something I’ve never had, climate, culture… and then we massaged all the numbers to make sure Portland won.

The kids immediately decided Portland was friendlier. I don’t know what convinced them of that, since Texas is an overtly gregarious place. Maybe it’s the subtler approving nods when they tear down the streets in costumes, the cars stopping for pedestrians, the non-competitive atmosphere they experienced at school, the fact that I feel safe with them on bicycles even though our street is busier than the street we lived on in Dallas — people are looking for bicyclists. I think for me it came the moment we were eating on the patio of a vegetarian restaurant and the three year old sneaked off around a planter, proudly relieving himself and watering the plants, and I was dying of mortification and imagining being asked never to return, when to my surprise the other diners just laughed and smiled and said they wished they could have gotten away with it. This is very Northeast Portland, I think. I try and warn the kids about broad generalizations, but I know what the reaction would have been had this happened in Dallas. And this event marked what I can only explain as a period of feeling slowly unfurled, that I could be who I was and parent the way I believe in parenting without fear of censure or of offending people around me — this tremendous atmosphere of live and let live was so liberating.

We’ve become friends with another family that has made the same Texas to Portland move this summer, and that’s provided a nice opportunity to show off all we’ve learned about fitting in here and to reflect on what this last year has meant. Each of us, except perhaps the baby, had close friends in Dallas it was painful to leave, and yet no one has ever voiced any regret about making the move. We’ve argued whether there’s a dark side to Portland; that the slightly anti-authoritarian bent of northeast Portland and the live and let live attitude might be part of the problem with neighbors having drumming and howling at 3 a.m. solstice parties, or the neighbor who hired two guys to scrape paint off her badly peeling house, and left all the paint chips lying in our yard and today we tested them and discovered they’re positive for lead which sent me into a small tizzy. Not everyone is considerate and there are some interestingly conspiracy-minded people willing to talk your ear off. There are days when the ‘more organic than thou’ parenting dynamic feels a little stifling. Plus, my children can get their vocabularies more colorfully enriched just walking along Alberta Street than FCC guidelines would allow in their living rooms. But they’re smart kids who know not to use all the words they learn.

Maybe the biggest drawback is that living in a community that is generally more like-minded than what we had in Dallas, we can take it a bit for granted, both in the echo-chamber effect of thinking everyone must now be trying consciously to reduce their consumption of natural resources, etc., and in the sort of casual way you can bond at the park with another mother and then never see each other again. In our old life, these connections would be so precious and rare, you’d cleave to each other like survivors on a desert island. So for all of the casual connections I’ve enjoyed, there’s been less intimacy, but that could also be about the time friendships take.

This sort of cross-country move is terrifying in its own way. As much as I can complain about ruts, I like routines and knowing what to expect, being able to rehearse difficult things in my head before I have to do them, the drive, the parking, the walk, who I’ll see, what I’ll say… And for the last year everything has been new. People at the preschool here don’t know about the years of service and volunteering I did at the last preschool (which was actually a little relief, since I was asked to do less, but on the other hand I missed the respect). I didn’t get to go to the midwife who delivered my last two sons for my annual check-up, had to find new dentists and doctors and babysitters and places to buy cat food, there was no detail I could take for granted. I spend hours on the phone to Texas. But I think to have known that the challenge was there and I was too scared to face it would have been more uncomfortable than the risk involved in moving. Finally, doing a family bicycle ride along the Historic Columbia River Highway State Trail and being overwhelmed at the sweetness of the air, the breadth of the river, the height of the trees, the joy of being in mountains, all I could ask was what we had been doing wasting all that time in Texas.